Twitter was hit with a widespread attack on Wednesday that allowed hackers to take over an array of accounts including those of celebrities, politicians, billionaires and many US companies.
President Barack Obama, Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg and a number of tech billionaires including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Celebrities Kanye West and his wife, Kim Kardashian West, were also hacked.
The attackers posted tweets that appeared to promote a cryptocurrency scam. The fake tweets offered to send $2,000 for every $1,000 sent to an anonymous Bitcoin address.
Bill gates tweet reads:
“Everyone is asking me to give back, and now is the time,”, promising to double all payments to a Bitcoin address for the next 30 minutes.
Twitter Said:
“Once we became aware of the incident, we immediately locked down the affected accounts and removed Tweets posted by the attackers,”
“We have locked accounts that were compromised and will restore access to the original account owner only when we are certain we can do so securely.”
See Tweets from hackers:
There is no evidence that the owners of these accounts were targeted themselves. Instead, the hackers appeared designed to lure their twitter followers into sending money to an anonymous Bitcoin account.
Twitter However made a move to prevent holders of verified accounts from tweeting. Non-verified accounts could still tweet, however.
Twitter CEO Said:
“We all feel terrible this happened,” “We’re diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened.”
This is hardly the first time hackers have created mischief on Twitter. Just last year, the account of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was broken and was used to pass racist comment and chants.
Investors also appeared to be concerned about potential fallout from the hack affecting Twitter’s usage. Twitter’s shares fell 3% in extended trading after news of the hack broke.
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